Leader: We need to shine light into some of our darkest corners

THE proposals for the UK to move to Central European Time and the decision to abolish the legal impediment on future monarchs marrying Roman Catholics have brought out the best and the worst in the Scottish National Party.

The idea there might be benefits in moving to having darker mornings and lighter evenings at the heart of winter, the result of a UK government plan to move to Central European Time, brought out the worst. No sooner had the proposal been announced than the SNP MP for the Western Isles, Angus MacNeil, denounced “Tory time bandits” and their “daylight robbery”.

Mr MacNeil’s denunciations are utterly spurious and he knows it. It is a simple fact that because of the Earth’s relationship to the sun, we have a finite amount of hours of sunlight per day in the winter. By changing the clocks so sunrise and sunset are at a different time, we still have the same amount of daylight. As there was evidence this reduced road accidents when a similar change was tried in the 1960s, the farmers’ union in Scotland, usually SNP allies, gave the idea a cautious welcome. However, if it comes to choice between reason and an attack on perfidious Albion, the SNP, on this occasion, chose the former.

Would that their main opposition in Scotland were made of more logical, less populist stuff. Sadly, Labour’s new shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran, seeing a chance to attack the coalition in London, jumped on the “daylight robbery” bandwagon, forming an unholy alliance of unionist and nationalist in casting rational debate to one side in the pursuit of headlines.

Alex Salmond’s response to the changes proposed by David Cameron to the laws on the monarchy which will allow women to inherit the throne and heirs to the throne to marry Catholics were, by contrast, more thoughtful. He may have had an eye on the Catholic vote, but the First Minister has a long record of campaigning for the end to the restriction on royal marriage to Catholics which is contained in the 1701 Act of Settlement and which has been a constitutional anachronism which Mr Cameron and Commonwealth leaders deserve credit for ending.

The First Minister is also right to argue against the continued insistence the king or queen cannot be a Catholic, pointing out this is bound up to the fact the monarch will be head of the established Church of England. Mr Salmond has a point in saying that if the Act of Settlement, and other ancient laws, can be unpicked, it cannot be beyond the wit of legislators to find a way to end this last remnant of the religious divisions which shaped Scotland and England, and later the UK, over centuries. Such a change might need to wait for greater constitutional reform, perhaps of the House of Lords, but 21st century Britain is no place for religious discrimination anywhere, from the monarchy down.